Stuffed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  Angie didn’t say anything to that. She just made a humming sound that I knew meant she wasn’t completely satisfied with my answer.

  Why was I lying? Well, I wasn’t lying, was I? I was down at the DEC. And the job did concern permits. And at an interview, they do treat you better if you wear a tie. So it wasn’t a lie. But I didn’t much like telling her a half-truth either.

  See, if I told her about it, she would give an opinion. Or even if she didn’t, I’d read something into whatever she said, thinking she wanted me to take the job or not take it. Then, if I did what I thought she wanted me to do and I regretted it, I might hold it against her, or stick with a job I hated to please her, which might lead to more resentment. Then again, if I did what I thought she didn’t want me to do and I liked my choice and she didn’t, then she might resent me. Of course, she might encourage me to do what she thought I wanted rather than what she really wanted, and if I countered by doing the opposite of what she said she wanted and it turned out badly, we might resent each other. Or not. Whatever—it made my head hurt working all the permutations. I felt the decision was mine alone to make in the vacuum of my own panic.

  They had offered me the job on the spot. It paid roughly what I was making now plus the benefits. How could I turn it down? I had a week to let them know.

  “Tell me again how they said your stuff ended up in a safety net?” Angie smiled into the sun, the wind whipping her hair. She looks great in sunglasses of all kinds, sort of the way women can look great in all kinds of hats. Sunglasses were her accessory vice, and she owned dozens. Catty black shades with rhinestones had been chosen for this trip.

  “Dunno.” I gulped, suppressing thoughts of the job. “Someone must have thrown it off the bridge. I figure it wasn’t for safekeeping. Man, I can’t believe the luck of it. Getting all my stuff back. Never thought I’d see it again. Wanna find the E-ZPass?”

  “How do you mean?” She opened the glove compartment, found the transponder, and held it up to the windshield.

  “How do I mean what?” The tollgate flipped up.

  “Throwing it off the bridge.”

  “What I meant was, someone was trying to throw my stuff into the Connecticut River and didn’t see the netting. Animal lifers?”

  Angie adjusted her sunglasses and made a sour face, the one she makes at a crossword puzzle that doesn’t fully cooperate. “Drove a long way just to dump the goods. Most of those animal lifers want their stunts publicized. No publicity in just dumping it off a bridge. And they usually break into places when nobody is there. These guys were too confrontational. Didn’t seem like PETA types to me.”

  I bobbed my head in agreement and gunned the Lincoln onto 9A. “Well, whoever they were, they took a greater risk getting caught by going out on that bridge with all my animals. Why not just bury them in the woods somewhere? Or burn them somewhere publicly so it would make the news?”

  “Hmmm.” Angie nodded. “It’s like they just wanted to make the loot disappear, y’know? Say they panicked. Or maybe the bridge was on their way somewhere else, or they were just driving and had this impulse.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?” I adjusted the rearview mirror. “And why take the booty so far away?”

  “Unless this was near where they live, or, like I said, on the way somewhere.”

  “So you’re suggesting they came all the way to New York from Massachusetts to case our apartment and steal my livelihood? Some shiftless Gloucester fishermen happen to be thumbing through the Manhattan yellow pages and say, ‘Hey, let’s rip this guy off.’ Quite a stretch, sweetie.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “Did the police say whether anything was damaged?”

  “All he said was that it was in plastic garbage bags, except the tusks, of course. Should at least have been kept reasonably dry.”

  Our quizzing subsided into mutual perplexity, so Angie set upon the latest New York Times crossword book as I took us from the Cross County to the Hutchinson Parkway to 684 to Brewster, then headed east on I-84. It was a gorgeous day, uncommonly dry and warm for late May. Angie besieged me with crossword clues for a couple hours. She answered most of them herself, of course, but I miraculously got three in a row. Across, three-letter word for percentage: VIG. Down, beginning with V, a nine-letter word for reprisal: VENGEANCE. Across, beginning with G, a six-letter word for a penguin’s nest: GABLIT. You could see where my mind was. We passed through Hartford, and once on I-91 we off-ramped for a pit stop. I filled the Lincoln’s tank and Angie emptied hers. Back on the road in a jiffy.

  “Y’know,” Angie began, pointing a Slim Jim at me, “it could be that the thieves were on their way to sell the booty, like in Rangely or something.”

  I taxied the Lincoln onto an entrance ramp. “Still doesn’t explain why they dumped the stuff.”

  “I wonder if the crow got all futzed up,” Angie pouted. All I could envision was someone with a hacksaw cutting up my tusks, or my beautiful tiger rug sitting in the mud on the bottom of the Connecticut River. I had dismissed the loss of the fifty-dollar crow, not to mention the issue of whether anybody would go to such extremes to possess it. Until, that is, we reached the Massachusetts State Police barracks. My possessions were all there and in good condition, even the tusks. Everything except for the crow. I looked up at the officer holding the pen and clipboard out to me.

  “Is this all of it?”

  “Yessir. Damn lucky they were inspecting the bridge this month and that net was there, I’ll say.”

  “But there was no crow.”

  “A what?”

  “A crow, a white crow in a bell jar?” Angie chimed.

  The trooper looked suspicious and jabbed the clipboard at me. I took it.

  “Just what you see here. Sign the top, bottom, and middle. Press hard.”

  Angie and I stowed all ten leaf bags of beasts in the Lincoln and drove off to find an early dinner. Along the way, we crossed a bridge over the Connecticut River.

  I pointed to a sign. “Hey, this is the bridge.”

  “French King Bridge?”

  “Yup, that’s the one he said.”

  “Pull over.” Angie waved at a rest area on the far side of the bridge. It was connected to a pedestrian walkway that followed the length of the bridge. There was a terrific view up the river, and the bridge seemed monstrously high. I had trouble looking down without vertigo kicking in. But I looked long enough to see the net where my taxidermy had been found, about forty feet down. Five’ll get you ten Liberty Valance and his thugs dropped their ill-gotten gains at night and didn’t even see the net.

  Back on the road, we quickly found one of those humdrum middle-America places called Bob’s Family Restaurant. The kind of die-stamped joint that’s in every mall from Miscoganie to Missoula. Once outside New York, the eateries are so repetitive from Palookaville to Palookaville, you’d swear you were driving in circles.

  A young waitress came by and took our orders, and when I asked if I could have my fries well done, she said, “Sure, mister.”

  As she sauntered away, I turned to Angie. “I ask you, why am I suddenly mister? Not bub, not fellah, not sir. But mister. Do I look like a mister to you?”

  “This is weird, Garth.”

  “I know. I don’t feel like a mister.”

  “Could you stop obsessing for a moment? I was talking about the crow. The crow is weird, id-jit.” She straw-slurped her cherry cola.

  “I’ll get you another present.” I gave her my squinty, vexed look. “The point is that—”

  “I know: You got your treasures back. What I mean is—”

  “Right, right—that the crow was missing. Nothing to do about that. I feel damn lucky to have gotten any of it back. I’ll assume the loss as a sacrifice to the gods.” I knew where Angie was trying to go with this train of thought and vainly attempted to steer her away.

  “Lucky, sure, but you should feel spooked too. Those guys obviously came all the
way from somewhere up here to swipe that crow. Like Jim Kim said.”

  “There are at least a dozen other explanations—”

  “Name ’em.”

  “Okay.” I held up a hand and began pointing to my fingers. “They threw the crow in the river separately and it missed the net. It was heavy and tore through the safety net. They dropped the crow somewhere else. One of the construction workers who found my stuff kept the crow. The burglars decided to keep the crow. . . .”

  She grabbed my pinky. “That net is meant to catch hefty construction workers who slip and fall, ya big dummy. Can’t see how the bell jar would tear through. Don’t you think it might be that they took the other mounts just to make it look like they weren’t stealing the crow?”

  “Like the crow was packed with cocaine or something? Microfilm? What?”

  “Garth, don’t get like that with me.”

  “Like what?” If Pete Durban is a terrier, Angie can be a pit bull when it comes to puzzles, brainteasers, and the like. I sometimes kid her she’d be better off hitched to Alex Trebek. He drives a convertible, I’m sure.

  “Sarcastic. And blind. It’s just like that gallbladder thing. You didn’t want to see what was going on because you were afraid to find out.”

  “Damn right, Angie. And I’ve got a lot to be afraid of if that Fletcher guy came all the way to our house to steal that crow.” I glanced at some gawkers at the next table and stuck my tongue out at them. I lowered my voice. “If there are Colombians, Nazis, cultists, or terrorists who want the crow that bad, they can have it, because after what almost happened to us—”

  “Fletcher?” She arched an eyebrow. I hadn’t bothered to tell her about Frat Boy.

  “What?” It had occurred to me in the days since the robbery that maybe, just maybe, one of the attackers had been that Bret Fletcher who tried to fight me for the crow back up there in Bermuda. But that was pretty damn far-fetched.

  Our food suddenly arrived and I got busy putting ketchup on some cold, undercooked fries. Angie messed with her sticky-looking nachos.

  She was dead on, of course. There was the distinct possibility that they were after the crow and stole the other stuff to cover their motives. So if, for the sake of argument, one of the thieves had been Fletcher, who were the other two guys? As much as I was completely earnest about not tangling with these characters, that grub of vengeance was squirming in my brain. I don’t think of myself as that kind of guy. Life is too short to be spent defending every little slight. But when I pictured that guy’s hand on Angie’s neck . . . well, it made me want to have some Malay cone snails at the ready. Or at the very least, see these bastards in jail.

  “Garth?”

  She woke me from my dark reverie. “Hmm?”

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Fletcher.”

  And so it was that the Lincoln found its way back up to Bermuda.

  Chapter 7

  There’s something decidedly sinister about a New England village after dark. The byways are empty but awash in the light of eerie green streetlamps. Wizened old maples and sycamores shroud sidewalks in the sporadic shadows of branches swaying in the wind. Spatters of lamplight skitter like ghost crabs across picket fences and white clapboard houses, the surge of rustling leaves like waves breaking on rocks. Fix your gaze on each grizzled trunk as you pass: Is someone hiding there, sliding to the far side of the tree? Stop. Listen. Were those footsteps behind you, matching your steps? That guy in the window, reading, rocking back and forth: a zombie, normalcy’s pretense, the town in the grips of Satan’s most ominous coven?

  Angie and I looked up at the bear holding a scripted CLOSED sign. I imagined his eyes might just glow red with Cerberus’s incarnate evil, followed by the sound of a distant calliope and chanting clowns. In case you hadn’t already guessed, my psyche is burdened with formative years devoted to Creature Features.

  “Things seem pretty damn quiet in Bermuda.” I shivered, the little hairs on my neck standing at full attention. “What say we drop in on Gunderson in the morning and ask about Fletcher then? Tonight we’d better backtrack to that roadhouse and nab a room.”

  “About five miles back,” Angie sighed in agreement.

  Wind whistling over the convertible top, I cranked the heat and we barreled down the country road.

  “Angie, what would you think if I, you know, took a job?”

  “A job?”

  “Yeah, you know . . .”

  She gave me a hard look. “I think you’d have to buy a real tie and mothball that pony-skin tie you have, that’s what.”

  “I’m serious.”

  I saw her roll her eyes in the dashboard’s lime glow.

  “Garth, you say that every year. What kind of job? Let me guess. At U.S. Fish and Wildlife?”

  “Pete Durban said if I ever get tired of hauling dead animals hither and yon I should give him a call.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, are you tired of your stupid taxidermy racket?”

  “A stupid racket? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Angie gave me a sneaky smile. “It means that if you still react so defensively to that wisecrack, you don’t hate your craft as much as you think. Not enough to toss it for some job you want just because it’s steady.”

  The problem with being in love with a smart person is that you have to put up with them being right a lot of the time. Not that I admitted it at the time, mind you.

  The motel came into view and the discussion came to a timely close. The Maple Motor Court was essentially a tavern with a crescent of tiny white cabins behind it. You checked in at the bar by the light of a Narragansett beer sign. But while the barmaid fussed over the key rack and I signed in, I sensed something amiss. Scanning the sundry plaid patrons, nothing remarkable caught my eye. Two were looking toward but not at me, the way townsfolk check out strangers. Nothing odd in that. There was a full mug at the bar stool next to them, and I heard a toilet flush. I chalked up my spookiness to Creature Features and one too many Hammer films, signed the register, took the key from the barmaid, and headed for Angie and the Lincoln waiting out front.

  I passed into the foyer and through the second door. I glanced back into the bar. There was someone at the empty bar stool, and he was looking in my direction.

  It was Bret Fletcher, who looked like the dean had just caught him in the girls’ dorm.

  “Son of a—” I may not have wanted to practice my pugilism the last time I saw him, but now I wanted to take a poke at him. The more I thought about it, the more I figured he must have been one of those bastards who roughed us up.

  I doubted he saw me looking back, what with the light being on his side of two separate panes of glass. I got into the Lincoln, drove us to our cabin, and told Angie I was going to step out for a beer and catch the Late Nite Show, maybe see if Aunt Jilly made the program. There was no TV in the cabin, and Angie always reads before bed.

  Creeping along the shadow of the tavern, I peeped through the darkened kitchen window and into the barroom. All I could glimpse was the back of Bret’s red plaid coat and occasionally his arm as he gestured to his cronies in some sort of animated conversation.

  A battered green pickup came rattling down the road and roared to a stop in front of the tavern, tooting its horn. Bret’s two cronies stood up abruptly and headed for the door. But before they left, they gave Bret a glare that put fresh mojo on my little neck hairs.

  These two were older than Bret, and considerably more weathered. The taller, slimmer one had pretty big teeth. And a toothpick. He wore a felt cowboy hat, atypical antlers for folks around these parts. And the hat wasn’t some sort of white job with a big red feather that ho-dad ranch-hand wannabes wear. This was sweat-stained, rain-freckled, and well worn, complete with brim nicks from barbed wire and cigarette burns from smoking in the saddle. Or in the back of a pickup. Beat up as it was, it didn’t come off shabby because he obviously worked to keep the cre
ases sharp in the crown, and the brim had a uniform curl. He wore it at a slight angle that might lead you to believe he’d swung a few pool cues in his time. When Slim gave Bret a parting smile, those giant teeth looked ready to bite.

  Slim’s pal was short and stocky with a bush of red hair. Fiery eyebrows framed dark, button eyes. Hands in his pockets, he shouldered the door in Slim’s wake.

  I took a few steps forward to peek around the edge of the tavern as they opened the door and climbed into the cab of the truck. I couldn’t get an eyeful of the driver.

  Yep, these two could be the guys. The one who’d popped out of our basement with the gun might have been Bret. It clicked with his frenetic performance at Gunderson’s, complete with breaking voice. The guy with the raspy voice easily could have been Slim, a smoker. He certainly fit Otto’s bull’s-eye description: “Teeth big, vood in leeps.”

  I watched as the old truck lurched and rattled its way down the road, a blue haze of exhaust floating in its wake.

  Options presented themselves. They’d spotted me, no doubt about that, but probably felt I had no way of connecting them to the ski-masked assault in Manhattan. My return to Bermuda would be setting off alarms, though. They would figure that I may have recognized one of them somehow, and since I’d only seen Bret before, they’d deduce that I’d come up here to track him down. Or track down the white crow. The Three Amigos would have to stop me cold or blow town. And they didn’t look like they were headed for the hills in that old green pickup.

  So: Did they plan to do something about me? That very night?

  I waited in the shadows until Bret finished his beer, left the tavern, got into a dented Honda Civic, and whirred off down the street. Lucky nobody happened by or I might have been chased down the street as a peeping Tom. I guess angry Vermont mobs don’t lynch perverts—probably drown them in maple syrup.

  Am I plum loco? My assumptions were galling. Was my secret greed for vengeance playing tricks on me, putting square pegs in round holes, making three hapless strangers into the ones who had assaulted me and Angie? I went through it again, point by point, looking for a lapse in judgment. Basically, other than Bret having been angry about the crow, what possible reason would he have for stealing it? Let me guess—it was a family heirloom? A deceased pet? A substitute security blanket, his very own pink blankey, Bret all curled up in bed with a cold bell jar, sucking his thumb?